In Our Time

published	January 31st 1996 by Scribner
binding	Paperback
isbn	0684822768 (isbn13: 9780684822761)
pages	160
description	No writer has been more efficiently overshadowed by his imitators than Ernest Hemingway. From the moment he unleashed his stripped-down, declarative ...more [close] No writer has been more efficiently overshadowed by his imitators than Ernest Hemingway. From the moment he unleashed his stripped-down, declarative sentences on the world, he began breeding entire generations of miniature Hemingways, who latched on to his subtractive style without ever wondering what he'd removed, or why. And his tendency to lapse into self-parody during the latter half of his career didn't help matters. But In Our Time, which Hemingway published in 1925, reminds us of just how fresh and accomplished his writing could be--and gives at least an inkling of why Ezra Pound could call him the finest prose stylist in the world. In his first commercially published book (following the small-press appearance of Three Stories and Ten Poems in 1924), Hemingway was still wearing his influences on his sleeve. The vignettes between each story smack of Gertrude Stein, whose minimalist punctuation and clodhopping rhythms he was happy to borrow. "My Old Man" sounds like Huck Finn on the Grand Tour: "Well, we went to live at Maisons-Lafitte, where just about everybody lives except the gang at Chantilly, with a Mrs. Meyers that runs a boarding house. Maisons is about the swellest place to live I've ever seen in all my life." But in the "The Battler" or "Indian Camp" or "Big Two-Hearted River," Hemingway finds his own voice, shunning the least hint of rhetorical inflation and sticking to just the facts, ma'am. His reluctance to traffic in high-flown abstraction has often been chalked up to postwar disillusion--as though he were too much of a simpleton to make deliberate stylistic decisions. Still, nobody can read "Soldier's Home" without drawing a certain connection between the two. Returning home to Oklahoma, the hero finds that his tales of combat are now a bankrupt genre: <blockquote> Even his lies were not sensational at the pool room. His acquaintances, who had heard detailed accounts of German women found chained to machine guns in the Argonne forest and who could not comprehend, or were barred by their patriotism from interest in, any German machine gunners who were not chained, were not thrilled by his stories. </blockquote> If we are to believe Michael Reynolds and Ann Douglas, this passage reflects the author's own dreary homecoming as a member of the lost generation. It's also a fine example of a surprisingly rare phenomenon, at least at this point in his career: Hemingway being funny. --James Marcus [close]
date added	12-06-06 edit book

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01/13/08

bookshelves: currently-teaching

Read in January, 1980

I'm rereading this over the weekend preparing to teach it Thursday night. It's hard to organize my responses, partly because I'm reading these stories for the umpteenth zillion time and partly because I'm reading trying to anticipate student resistance. It will be an interesting class bc 1) I'll be the only dude in the room 2)a significant portion of the class if African-American, which makes me anxious about "The Battler", 3) most of these students are fairly conservative and aren't r...more I'm rereading this over the weekend preparing to teach it Thursday night. It's hard to organize my responses, partly because I'm reading these stories for the umpteenth zillion time and partly because I'm reading trying to anticipate student resistance. It will be an interesting class bc 1) I'll be the only dude in the room 2)a significant portion of the class if African-American, which makes me anxious about "The Battler", 3) most of these students are fairly conservative and aren't really interested in being shocked into confronting the violence of horse guts, dead soldiers, and hanged men's sphincters that make up the vignettes, and 4) I'm feeling my own weariness toward Hem lately and am doing everything possible to procrastinate in my class prep (including logging onto this site).

The main thing I'll stress is the style in which EH wrote these. I'll share the quote from MOVEABLE FEAST about cutting the scrollwork, I'll read a passage or two out of the apprentice stories that are by and large b-a-d ("The Passing of Pickles McCarthy," anyone?), and I'll talk about the influence of Stein, Anderson, Pound, and the Little Review. We'll talk about the design of the book and the principle of organization binding it together. I'll bring in the line from EH's correspondence with Edmund Wilson about the effect being like looking at a landscape through bionoculars and with the naked eye. Then we'll go over the biographical stuff: EH's ambivalence toward his father, his resentment of his mother, the war, upper Michigan, etc, etc.

It boils down to this: Several of these stories are peerless ("Indian Camp," "Soldiers Home," "Big Two-Hearted River"). Some are duds ("A Very Short Story"). The marriage tales are a mixed bag; some feel dated ("Cat in the Rain"), others are OK ("Out of Season"), some just don't work for me ("Cross-Country Snow"), and others are intriguing in a kinky kind of way ("Mr. and Mrs. Elliott"). The vignettes are by and large very powerful in their descriptive exactitude except for moments when I feel Hemingway posturing. "My Old Man" holds up even if it is Anderson's "I Want to Know Why" in a different setting, but "Up in Michigan" is inaccroachable as Stein called it---EH couldn't write sex scenes, except in "For Whom the Bell Tolls" (which everybody makes fun of bc of the "did thee feel the earth move?" line). You can't argue with the historical import and influence of IN OUR TIME. Whether the stories are uniformly compelling is a whole other matter. It'll be an interesting class.......less

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